Hi Clint You say " L.A., Never have I seen (1) Plextor recorder released when it was not TOTALLY, 100% ready, dunno where you got that??! Maybe that was with the agreement of the free A-Open, to try and burn Plextor ... Maybe I should mention the 27 P's now you have mentioned the AOpen

Given estimated date of the review and day that the product will hit retail... does that mean Yamaha has enough time to send you another version of firmware to address any outstanding issues before you post?

I think Yamaha shot themselves in the foot on this one. If this product made it to market on the 15th, it would have done well, if it performed up to expectations. With the new *coughLiteOn... TDK 48X24X48X hitting retail next week nearly $75 less than the F1... it puts Yamaha in quite the pickle... especially if the Series 6 chipset lives up to expectations.

Carefull John don't tell them the truth about Lite-on or all the Hornets will be out of there nests again saying how good they are and then a few days later come back on the forum saying that they have a problem !!!!!!!

LOL... well perhaps the drive will be ready for primetime when FW update 1.0C hits the streets.

John... can more write speeds be added with a FW update?

I just thought of a good analogy as to why I don't like the OSWC/burn speeds.

If you buy a car with a 5 speed automatic... wouldn't it piss you off if all the car had was P, R, N, D (especially coming from a stick shift)? There is no 4, 3, 2, 1... so you cannot play with things and get optimal performance.

Because these things never work 100% of the time and bottom line... I want flexibility to do what I want. Every other 40 and 48X drive on the market supports the selection of a wide variety of writing speeds when selected manually. What was once convention is now a standard... Yamaha just seems to have missed the boat.

It would have cost Yamaha virtually nothing to add the speeds in for manual selection, they're being used by OSWC, so why not give customers what they want? I'm not the only one with this concern/issue with the drive.